Sponsored Post: Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories

The following guest post is by Melissa Murray (NYU School of Law), Katherine Shaw (Cardozo), and Reva B. Siegel (Yale) and is sponsored by West Academic.

Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories (Foundation Press® 2019) examines the field of reproductive rights and justice, with attention to the dynamics of legal change inside and outside of courts.

Where reproductive rights are often defined as negative liberties that protect individuals against government coercion, reproductive justice thinks holistically about the conditions in which individuals make decisions about having and not having children. The field examines how relations of race, class, language, citizenship, sexuality, and gender shape decisions about reproduction and intimate life, inside and outside of law—in the organization of communities, markets, health care, religion, and other structures of social life. Pursuit of reproductive justice is not limited to greater access to contraception and abortion, but instead includes conflicts over sterilization, pregnancy, and assisted reproductive technologies. Critically, reproductive justice cannot be attained in courts alone, but instead requires action across many bodies of law, and in many social domains, to redress inequalities in intimate life.

The stories collected in this book present legal change broadly to capture the multiple social contexts in which these conflicts occur. This method for understanding constitutional change—what one of us has termed “democratic constitutionalism”—recognizes that debate over constitutional meaning unfolds inside and outside of courts and inside and outside of the state. Obviously, courts matter. But so do other actors and institutions—from grassroots organizations, NGOs, and political parties to state and federal legislatures to administrative agencies and bureaucrats to interested individuals.

Many chapters shed new light on cases that are very much part of the constitutional law canon—Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Geduldig v. Aiello. Others introduce the reader to less well-known cases from state and lower federal courts that illuminate paths not taken in constitutional law. All of the chapters contain lessons for contemporary controversies. (Indeed, a recent symposium, hosted by the Take Care blog, featured a number of response essays tying the chapters to developments in the law and politics of reproductive rights and justice.).

Contributing authors include: Melissa Murray, Neil Siegel, Linda Greenhouse, Reva Siegel, Deborah Dinner, Maya Manian, Khiara Bridges, Serena Mayeri, Priscilla Ocen, Sam Bagenstos, Kate Shaw, Cary Franklin, and Doug NeJaime.